Darkness encroached upon the borders of reality as her eyelids began to droop. Unconsciousness seemed like a welcome friend. Fighting to stay alert, she shrugged off her stupor and struggled to get up.
The pavement was jagged and littered with broken glass. Its sharp edges punctured the palms of her hands as she pushed herself to her knees. Crying out in pain when a glossy shard sliced through her tender flesh like soft butter, she rocked back on her heels and cradled her injury.
With a trembling hand, she shielded her eyes and stared up at the hostile sky. Terror filled her throat with bitter bile as she watched the darkening clouds swirl into a foreboding eddy with sparks of electricity shooting from its core like deadly arrows.
Huge bolts of lightning seemingly played tag as they jumped from one billow to another. Each blazing dagger radiated from a central point, extended outward, and cut the heavens into jagged pieces of an enormous pie.
Cheyenne’s head throbbed with every pulse and her ears howled as if wild animals raced through her skull. The light was disorienting, making her nauseous and weak. Wrestling with incoherence, she pitched forward onto her hands, ignoring the painful sting on her palms when they slapped the asphalt.
Her mind began spinning as her surroundings slowly faded into a racing blur of melted colors. The air around her culminated into an awesome vortex of gyrating motion. And she was the only thing grounded within the eye of this terrifying display of churning activity.
Just when she thought she’d be sucked into the belly of this raging vacuum, everything suddenly stopped. The wind no longer ripped at her hair or screamed in her ears. It was now a gentle roll of ocean waves lapping against the shore, its soothing caress skillfully drawing her into a state of disoriented bliss.
And the lightning no longer danced from one place to another, blinding her with its white-hot fury, but rather drew itself out in one long fractured line that traced the distant horizon. It faded in and out, like the blinking of an old fluorescent bulb on the verge of expiration.
Cheyenne staggered to her feet. Slowly, she turned around in a complete circle, dazed and confused. The line of light stretched as far as she could see. There was no beginning, no end. It was as if the world had been cut in two—the Earth separated from its heaven by this strange electric band.
